1306John Birch Society

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Ram Lau

Nov 30, 2005

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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man
December 1, 1955, 50 years ago. That provided great momentum for the
Civil Right Movement. Meanwhile, a group named the John Birch Society
was formed in attempt to "fight communism" and coincidentally attack
the social liberals who fought for the civil rights of the colored
citizens.

The John Birch society is still very active in the West, such as Idaho
and Utah. (The strongly Republican states, so go figure.) JFK once
said, "Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names." Never
forget who these people were, and where they are.

Robert Welch introduced the idea of the John Birch Society at an
Indianapolis meeting he convened on December 9, 1958 of 12 "patriotic
and public-spirited" men. The first chapter was founded a few months
later in February 1959. The core thesis of the society was contained
Welch's initial Indianapolis presentation, transcribed almost verbatim
in The Blue Book of the John Birch Society, and subsequently given to
each new member. According to Welch, both the US and Soviet
governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of
internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left
unexposed, the traitors inside the US government would betray the
country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist new
world order managed by a "one-world socialist government." The Birch
Society incorporated many themes from pre-WWII rightist groups opposed
to the New Deal, and had its base in the business nationalist sector
discussed earlier.

Welch was born in 1899 and worked "in the candy manufacturing business
all of his adult life," for many years as the vice president for sales
and advertising of the James O. Welch Company, founded by his brother.
He was on the board of directors of the ultraconservative National
Association of Manufacturers for seven years starting in 1950, and
chaired NAM's Educational Advisory Committee for two years. It was at
NAM, during the height of the Red Menace hysteria, that Welch honed
his Americanist philosophy. Welch toured the country chairing meetings
on the state of American education, and producing a 32-page brochure
"This We Believe About Education," that "concluded that in America
parents--and not the State--have the ultimate responsibility for the
education of their children." 200,000 copies of the brochure were
distributed by NAM.

Welch served as vice chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party
finance committee in 1948, and unsuccessfully ran for Lt. Governor in
the 1950 Republican primary. Welch supported the ultraconservative
Taft over the more moderate Eisenhower by running as a Massachusetts
Taft delegate to the 1952 Republican convention. In 1952 Welch wrote
May God Forgive Us, a study alleging "subversive influences" by
government officials and their allies to shape "public opinion and
governmental policies to favor the Communist advance." The book was
published by the ultraconservative Henry Regnery Company, which in
1954 also published Welch's The Life of John Birch, which told the
story of a fundamentalist missionary in China who became an
intelligence agent for General Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. Birch
was killed by Chinese communist soldiers while he was on a mission at
the end of WWII. In February of 1956 Welch started publishing a
magazine, One Man's Opinion, and in January 1957 he left the candy
business to devote his energies to "the anti-Communist cause."

Welch saw collectivism as the main threat to western civilization,
writing "both the Greek and the Roman civilizations did perish of the
cancer of collectivism, and the civilization of Western Europe is
doing so today." This view was shared by many conservatives of the
day, and had been developed by such conservative intellectuals as
Hayek. The ingredient that Welch added was an "uncompromising
conspiracy theory of world events, one that blamed domestic rather
than foreign enemies for the spread of communism," as Diamond
summarized. Although critical of Oswald Spengler's intellectual
snobbery, Welch agreed with Spengler's thesis in Decline of the West,
of a "cyclical theory of cultures," but Welch argued that western
European civilization was being prematurely put at risk by a
conspiracy to promote the decay of collectivism.

According to the JBS theory, liberals provide the cover for the
gradual process of collectivism, therefore many liberals and their
allies must actually be secret communist traitors whose ultimate goal
is to replace the nations of western civilization with one-world
socialist government. "There are many stages of` welfarism, socialism,
and collectivism in general," wrote Welch, "but communism is the
ultimate state of them all, and they all lead inevitably in that
direction." A core tenet of the JBS was that the US is a republic not
a democracy, and that collectivism has eroded that distinction. That
this distinction was largely a semantic trick--used to cover the
essential autocratic elitism of Welch and the JBS philosoph--was
examined by Lester DeKoster, a conservative Christian who warned of
the JBS anti-democratic agenda in his monograph titled The Citizen and
the John Birch Society.

The JBS concern that collectivism, statism, and internationalism would
be ushered in through a subversive communist conspiracy naturally
evolved into the JBS "Get US out of UN!" campaign, which alleged in
1959 that the "Real nature of [the] UN is to build One World
Government (New World Order)." Behind much of this concern was
opposition to communism not only on economic, ideological, and
pragmatic geopolitical grounds, but also because it was seen as a
godless conspiracy. The influence of fundamentalist Christian beliefs
on Birch doctrine are often obscured by the group's ostensible secular
orientation. As Welch put it, "This is a world-wide battle, between
light and darkness; between freedom and slavery; between the spirit of
Christianity and the spirit of anti-Christ for the souls and bodies of
men."

Welch's magazine, renamed American Opinion, became the official JBS
publication in 1959, as chapters began to be built. In January 1960
the Birch Society had 75 chapters and 1,500 members, and by September
1960 there were 324 chapters and some 5,300 members. In March of 1961,
according to Welch, there was "a staff of twenty-eight people in the
Home Office; about thirty Coordinators (or Major Coordinators) in the
field, who are fully-paid as to salary and expenses; and about one
hundred Coordinators (or Section Leaders as they are called in some
areas), who work on a volunteer basis as to all or part of their
salary, or expenses, or both." Estimates of Society membership by the
end of 1961 ranged from 60,000 to 100,000. The actual membership
figures are shrouded in secrecy and often disputed. Broyles argues
that in 1966 the actual active membership was more like 25,000 to
30,000, but this seems a low, and active members are outnumbered by
paid members in most groups.

No matter what the actual membership, the JBS pioneered grassroots
lobbying, combining educational meetings, petition drives, and letter
writing campaigns. One early campaign against the second Summit
Conference between the US and the Soviet Union generated over 600,000
postcards and letters, according to the Society. A June 1964 Birch
campaign to oppose Xerox Corporation sponsorship of TV programs
favorable to the UN produced 51,279 letters from 12,785 individuals.

Much of the early Birch conspiracism reflects an ultraconservative
business nationalist critique of business internationalists networked
through groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The CFR
is viewed through a conspiracist lens as puppets of the Rockefeller
family in a 1952 book by McCarthy fan, Emanuel M. Josephson,
Rockefeller, 'Internationalist': The Man Who Misrules the World. In
1962 Dan Smoot's The Invisible Government added several other policy
groups to the list of conspirators, including the Committee for
Economic Development, the Advertising Council, the Atlantic Council
(formerly the Atlantic Union Committee), the Business Advisory
Council, and the Trilateral Commission. Smoot had worked at FBI
headquarters in Washington, DC before leaving to establish an
anticommunist newsletter, The Dan Smoot Report. The shift from
countersubversion on behalf of the FBI to countersubversion in the
private sector was an easy one. The basic thesis was the same. In
Smoot's concluding chapter, he wrote, "Somewhere at the top of the
pyramid in the invisible government are a few sinister people who know
exactly what they are doing: They want America to become part of a
worldwide socialist dictatorship, under the control of the Kremlin."

In a 1966 speech, Welch coined the name "The Insiders" to describe the
leaders of the conspiracy. The Birch Society seems unable to make up
its mind if the Insiders are direct descendants of the Illuminati
Freemason conspiracy, although the basic concept is clearly related.
During the late 1980's and early 1990's the Birch leadership
downplayed the connection, while in the late 1990's, the Birch book
list began sprouting titles seeking to prove the link to the
Illuminati Freemason conspiracy. Many Birch members, and founder Welch
himself, expressed support for this thesis, sometimes in writing,
sometimes at Birch public meetings. According to the theory, there is
an unbroken ideologically-driven conspiracy linking the Illuminati,
the French Revolution, the rise of Marxism and Communism, the Council
on Foreign Relations, and the United Nations. Of course, not all Birch
members agreed with everything that Welch or the Society proposed.
Welch's famous book, The Politician, caused a stir even among many
loyal Birch members who were shocked by Welch's assertion that
President Dwight D. Eisenhower was "a dedicated conscious agent of the
communist conspiracy."

Birch Society influence on US politics hit its high point in the years
around the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate
Barry Goldwater who lost to incumbent President Lyndon Johnson. Welch
had supported Goldwater over Nixon for the 1960 Republican nomination,
but the membership split with two-thirds supporting Goldwater and
one-third supporting Nixon. A number of Birch members and their allies
were Goldwater supporters in 1964 and some were delegates at the 1964
Republican convention.

The John Birch Society White Book was a spiral-bound collection of all
JBS Weekly Bulletins issued in the previous year and handed to every
new member. The Bulletins in the 1964 White Book contain chatty and
anecdotal information about the campaigns important to the JBS. A
major effort was conducted under the slogan "Impeach Earl Warren,"
which was reported to be generating 500 letters per day to members of
Congress. The JBS also sought to restore prayer in school, repeal the
graduated personal income tax, stop "Communist influences within our
communications media," and stop the "trend of legislation by judicial
fiat."

The phrase "legislation by judicial fiat," was widely interpreted
within the JBS as opposition to federal assistance to the goals of the
civil rights movement over the objections of persons insisting that
state's rights should supersede federal laws. During its heyday in the
mid-1960s the Birch response to the civil rights movement and urban
unrest was to launch two "campaigns under the banners of Support Your
Local Police, and Expose The 'Civil Rights' Fraud.

The "Support Your Local Police" campaign opposed the use of federal
officers to enforce civil rights laws. "[T]he Communist press of
America has been screaming for years to have local police forces
discredited, shunted aside, or disbanded and replaced by Federal
Marshals or similar agents and personnel of a national federalized
police force," one article complained. Another reason articulated for
opposing the civil rights movement was that it was a creation of
Communists, and Birch members were urged to "Show the communist hands
behind it." According to a 1967 personal letter from Welch to retired
General James A. Van Fleet inviting him to serve on the Birch National
Council:

==="Five years ago, few people who were thoroughly familiar with the
main divisions of Communist strategy saw any chance of keeping the
Negro Revolutionary Movement from reaching decisive proportions. It
was to supply the flaming front to the whole 'proletarian revolution,'
as planned by Walter Reuther and his stooge, Bobby Kennedy"

Despite its opposition to civil rights, throughout this period the JBS
had a handful of black conservative members who supported this
position on philosophical grounds involving states rights, economic
libertarianism, and opposition to alleged communist subversion of the
civil rights movement.

The JBS simultaneously discouraged overt displays of racism, while it
promoted policies that had the effect of racist oppression by its
opposition to the Civil Rights movement. The degree of political
racism expressed by the JBS was not "extremist" but similar to that of
many mainstream Republican and Democratic elected officials at the
time. This level of mainstream racism should not be dismissed lightly,
as it was often crude and sometimes violent, treating Black people in
particular as second-class citizens, most of whom had limited
intelligence and little ambition. In Alan Stang's book published by
the JBS, It's Very Simple: The True Story of Civil Rights, Rev. Martin
Luther King, Jr. is portrayed as an agent of a massive communist
conspiracy to agitate among otherwise happy Negroes to foment
revolution, or at least promote demands for more collectivist federal
government intrusion.

The same is true with JBS levels of personal and political
antisemitism. When crude antisemitism was detected in JBS members,
their membership was revoked. The most celebrated incident involved
Birch leader Revilo P. Oliver who moved over to work with Willis Carto
and the Liberty Lobby after being forced to resign from the Birch
Society for making antisemitic and White supremacist comments at a
1966 Birch rally.

The Birch Society promoted the book None Dare Call It Conspiracy by
Gary Allen who included a dubious discussion of the Rothschilds and
other Jewish banking interests as part of a sketch of a much larger
conspiracy involving financial and political elites and the Council on
Foreign Relations. Allen explicitly rejected the idea that by focusing
on the early roll of the Rothschilds in investment banking he was
promoting a theory of a Jewish conspiracy:

==="Anti-Semites have played into the hands of the conspiracy by
trying to portray the entire conspiracy as Jewish. Nothing could be
farther from the truth. The traditionally Anglo-Saxon J. P. Morgan and
Rockefeller international banking institutions have played a key role
in the conspiracy. But there is no denying the importance of the
Rothschilds and their satellites. However it is just as unreasonable
and immoral to blame all Jews for the crimes of the Rothschilds as it
is to hold all Baptists accountable for the crimes of the Rockefellers.

Nicely put, yet Allen used insensitive loaded language concerning the
"cosmopolitan" nature of the "international bankers," and he slipped
when comparing Jews to Anglo-Saxons, mixing issues of race, ethnicity,
and religion. He seemed sincere in rejecting overt and conscious
antisemitism and did not seem to be cloaking a hidden hatred or
distrust of Jews, but he included a hyperbolic and inaccurate
assessment of the role of the Rothschilds, Warburgs, and other Jews
compared to the non-Jewish banking interests that grew along with
industrial capitalism. The problem was unintentional, but still real,
and the stereotype of a Jewish establishment was clearer in Allen's
other work, as Mintz explained, "A conspiracist unimpressed by
anti-Semitism could construe the material differently from a confirmed
sociological anti-Semite, who could find a codification of his fears
and anxieties."

In a similar fashion the Society promoted conspiracist theories that
involved mild antisemitism, and Welch once buttressed his claims of
the Illuminati conspiracy by citing notorious British antisemite Nesta
Webster. At its core, however, the Birch view of the conspiracy does
not reveal it to be controlled or significantly influenced by Jews in
general, or a secret group of conniving Jews, nor is their evidence of
a hidden agenda within the Society to promote suspicion of Jews. The
Society always struggled against what it saw as objectionable forms of
prejudice against Jews, but it can still be criticized for having
continuously promoted mild antisemitic stereotyping. Nevertheless, the
JBS was closer to mainstream stereotyping and bigotry than the naked
race hate and genocidal antisemitism of neonazi or KKK groups. When
the Society promoted a historic tract about the conspiracy, it was
usually their reprint of Robison's Proofs of a Conspiracy.

In a sense, the Birch society pioneered the encoding of implicit
cultural forms of ethnocentric White racism and Christian nationalist
antisemitism rather than relying on the White supremacist biological
determinism and open loathing of Jews that had typified the old right
prior to WWII. Throughout its existence, however, the Society has
promoted open homophobia and sexism.

The Society's anti-communism and states rights libertarianism was
based on sincere principles, but it clearly served as a cover for
organizing by segregationists and White supremacists. How much of this
was conscious, and how much unconscious, is difficult to determine.
That the Birch Society clearly attracted members with a more
hate-filled (even fascistic) agenda is undeniable, and these more
zealous elements used the JBS as a recruitment pool from which to draw
persons toward a more neonazi stance on issues of race and culture. As
Birch members assisted in building grassroots support for Goldwater's
Republican presidential bid in 1964, critics of the JBS highlighted
the group's more unsavory elements as a way to discredit Goldwater,
who was labeled an extremist. For the JBS, however, Goldwater was a
compromise candidate. JBS records from 1964 reveal Birch misgivings
about the political reliability of Goldwater. Newspaper articles from
the Birch archives show Goldwater quotes that conflict with Birch
dogma heavily underlined and sporting rows of question marks; yet a
racist and antisemitic attack on Goldwater by the White supremacist
Thunderbolt, is labeled "Poison," with a bold pen stroke.

After Goldwater was soundly drubbed in the general election, Welch
tried earnestly to recruit another politician to accept the Birch
torch-former Alabama Governor George Wallace. "It is the ambition and
the intention of Richard Nixon, during the next eight years, to make
himself the dictator of the world," warned Welch in a November 11,
1968 post-election letter to Wallace. "The people of this country are
ready for an anti-Communist crusade behind some political leader who
really means it," wrote Welch urging Wallace to adopt the Birch platform.

The more pragmatic conservatives and reactionaries who had been
fundraising and organizing specialists during the Goldwater campaign
would form the core of what became known as the New Right. Although
many New Right and new Christian Right activists were groomed through
the Birch Society, the group's core conspiracism, passionate and
aggressive politics, and its labeling by critics as a radical right
extremist group tainted by antisemitism and racism, were seen as
impediments to successful electoral organizing. The Birch Society
became a pariah. In the late 1970's the New Right coalition of secular
and Christian conservatives and reactionaries emerged as a powerful
force on the American political landscape, and was influential in
helping elect Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The eclipsed
Birch Society saw its influence dwindle even further after Reagan took
office, and further still after they attacked Reagan's policies.

When Robert F. Welch died in 1985, the Birch Society had shrunk to
less than 50,000 members. There then ensued an internal struggle over
who would grab the reins of the organization. The victors even
alienated Welch's widow who denounced the new leadership from her
retirement home in Weston, MA. Magazine subscriptions, often a close
parallel to membership, fell from 50,000 to 30,000 to 15,000.

The collapse of communism in Europe and the end of the Cold War might
have signaled the end of the Birch Society, but the UN role in the
Gulf War and President Bush's call for a New World Order unwittingly
echoed Birch claims about the goals of the internationalist One World
Government conspiracy. As growing right-wing populism sparked new
levels of cynicism regarding politicians, and economic and social
fears sparked rightist backlash movements, the Birch Society
positioned itself as the group that for decades had its fingers on the
pulse of the conspiracy behind the country's decline. Between 1988 and
1995 the Birch Society at least doubled, and perhaps tripled its
membership to over 55,000.
In the Birch Orbit
Conspiracist anti-communism similar to that offered by the JBS was
widespread on the nativist right during the 1950s and 1960s. In
addition to the books by Gary Allen, Robert Welch, Dan Smoot, and Alan
Stang are enough books in the genre to fill several library shelves.

Among the most influential leaders of the countersubversion movement
against the global communist conspiracy following the McCarthy period
was Dr. Fred Schwarz and his California-based Christian Anti-communism
Crusade. A tireless lecturer, Schwarz in 1960 authored You Can Trust
the Communists (to be Communists) which sold over one million
copies.Schwarz's newsletter once suggested that communists promote
abortion, pornography, homosexuality, venereal disease and mass murder
as ways to weaken the moral fiber of America and pave the way for a
communist takeover.

The assault on America by forces of godless communism were central
themes in three other widely distributed books which were used to
mobilize support for the 1964 Goldwater campaign. The best known book
was Phyllis Schlafly's A Choice, Not an Echo which suggested a
conspiracist theory in which the Republican Party was secretly
controlled by elitist intellectuals dominated by members of the
Bilderberger banking conference, whose policies were designed to usher
in global communist conquest.Schlafly's husband Fred had been a
lecturer at Schwartz's local Christian Anti-communism Crusade
conferences. The title "A Choice, Not an Echo" became one of
Goldwater's campaign slogans.

Schlafly elaborate on the theme of the global communist conspiracy and
its witting and unwitting domestic allies in The Gravediggers, a book
on military preparedness co-authored with retired Rear Admiral Chester
Ward. Ward, a member of the National Strategy Committee of the
American Security Council was also a lecturer at the Foreign Policy
Research Institute which formulated many benchmark Cold War
anti-communist strategies.The Gravediggers, claimed U.S. military
strategy and tactics was actually designed to pave the way for global
communist conquest. The Gravediggers was tailored to support the
Goldwater campaign.

Often overlooked because of the publicity surrounding A Choice, Not an
Echo was John Stormer's, None Dare Call it Treason, which outlined how
the equivocation of Washington insiders would pave the way for global
communist conquest. None Dare Call it Treason sold over seven million
copies, making it one of the largest-selling paperback books of the
day. The back cover summarizes the text as detailing "the
communist-socialist conspiracy to enslave America" and documenting
"the concurrent decay in America's schools, churches, and press which
has conditioned the American people to accept 20 years of retreat in
the face of the communist enemy." Stormer updated his text in the late
1980's to expand on his theory, shifting his focus from anti-communism
to claim secular humanism now played a key role in undermining America.

One of the core ideas of the US right is that modern liberalism is an
ally of collectivism and a handmaiden for godless communism.